Investigator hints at drug gang link in case of missing Briton

The disappearance of Lucie Blackman, the former British Airways stewardess who vanished in Tokyo, may have been linked with the Japanese drug trade, according to a former British policeman who is helping with the investigation.

The disappearance of Lucie Blackman, the former British Airways stewardess who vanished in Tokyo, may have been linked with the Japanese drug trade, according to a former British policeman who is helping with the investigation.

David Davies, who was in the Metropolitan Police's Royal Protection Squad, said Miss Blackman, 22, may have been sucked into the trade in the drug crystal methamphetamine, which is sold and used in the Roppongi area, where Miss Blackman was a bar hostess.

"It's important to emphasise that Lucie is not the kind of girl who would have taken this stuff herself," Mr Davies said after meeting Japanese police yesterday. "But some of her fellow hostesses do not have the same morals and in Roppongi there is an undercurrent of drugs and sex. She could have been asked to carry something or to take a message and may ... have become inadvertently involved."

Miss Blackman disappeared on 1 July after going for lunch with an unknown man, apparently a customer from the club where she worked. She told acquaintances she was going to Yokohama. At 5pm she rang to say she was "at the seaside" and later to say she would be home in an hour. Next day a man called to say she had joined a cult, although this was regarded as a ploy to throw investigators off the trail.

The disappearance is still being treated as a missing-person case rather than a crime, limiting the police's investigative powers. "There shouldn't be any doubt that this is a criminal abduction," said Mr Davies. "The greatest mystery is that from the moment she [Miss Blackman] stepped out of her house at 3.30 on that afternoon, nobody appears to have seen her."